In September, acclaimed poet Elizabeth Acevedo gave an inspiring performance at St. Joseph’s College.

A great poet named Elizabeth Acevedo came to St. Joseph’s College and did a great performance of her poems. Students and some of the staff were in the auditorium to watch the performance. We all grabbed some food and sat on the chairs that were organized for us in the auditorium. According to Elizabeth, she was the first person to go to college from her family, and all her poems reflected her feelings because they were based on her real life experiences and situations. Also, she shared a little bit about her personal life, she fell in love with a Black-American during her senior year of college. She told her mom about the guy and how he was getting an education at a business school and how he was smart and he would make her happy. At last, she gets married to him.

Acevedo discussed how her mom did not like the way her hair looked. Her mother used to tell her to straighten her hair and to look like an ordinary person, just like everyone else in the Dominican Republic. The last thing she said to her mother, when she kept on bothering her to fix her hair, was “You can’t fix what was never broken”. Her use of accurate and powerful words inspired me because she possessed a great self confidence. Moreover, she wrote a poem about her mom not liking her hair and posted it on Youtube, which one day her mother ended up seeing. Another poem was about her getting caught by her mom kissing on the train with the guy she was in love with. She then was ordered to nail rice as a punishment. Then there was the “Rat” poem, in which she described her fear of rats and the reason for this poem was her college professor. Another poem was called “Bittersweet love”, dedicated to the love of her life. The last poem was about the 2017 Presidential election in which she described and emphasized how she felt after the election. Overall, because I love poetry, I could totally tell how she put effort into writing her poems and that it was amazing to listen to with the dedication she had to herself.